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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23309401">The Line</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/frazzledsoul/pseuds/frazzledsoul'>frazzledsoul</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>A Soft Epilogue [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>A Song of Ice and Fire &amp; Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Family Fluff, Jonmund Week 2020, M/M, chosen family</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 14:16:04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,872</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23309401</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/frazzledsoul/pseuds/frazzledsoul</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon takes his daughters out for a hunt, and ponders recent revelations.</p><p>Written for Jonmund Week 2020 Day 2: Domesticity</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Minor or Background Relationship(s), Podrick Payne/Sansa Stark, Tormund Giantsbane/Jon Snow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>A Soft Epilogue [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1676281</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>61</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Line</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You’re still shit at that, you know,” Tormund whispered in Jon’s ear.</p><p>Magritte snickered from the other corner of the main room of their cabin where she was roughhousing with Ghost. Alsi sighed beside her, picking up her bow from where it was lying beside her and inspecting it for blemishes.</p><p>Jon continued to braid his youngest daughter’s hair, slipping one strand of hair underneath the other as Ana whined and fidgeted in front of him.</p><p>“Just because I’m going to be spending most of the day working on the longhouse doesn’t mean you have to do everything else – “</p><p>Jon shifted his head in Tormund’s direction and met a pair of concerned blue eyes with his own.</p><p>“I know,” he told him. “I know.”</p><p>Tormund reached out besides Jon and finished braiding the last strands of Ana’s hair. “I know you’re worried about me, but I’m fine,” he said in a slightly exasperated voice.<br/>Jon didn’t think so. Tormund had fallen off of the roof of the longhouse while patching up the roof last week not once but twice, and an injury that wouldn’t have given him pause a few years beforehand had him limping for the past three days. Jon had gradually taken over his duties and felt uncomfortable giving back control before Tormund was ready, even when it came to simple things like braiding their daughter’s hair.</p><p>Jon remembered how it had been in that first long year, as he and Tormund marched north with the remaining Free Folk. That was before he knew Tormund’s girls as the daughters they would become, before Ana, before he and Tormund were melded as intimately as they had been for the past five years. It had all been a maelstrom of grief and rage and guilt warring within him, as he cursed the fact that he had gotten what he had finally wanted when he believed he least deserved it.</p><p>It was a long year of tears and nightmares and pained silences before Tormund convinced him he was worthy of it. He had comforted Jon at his worst moments, soothed his night terrors, kept him marching on for something other than himself. The hard work of building a home for Tormund and his people, of gradually being accepted into his clan, his bed, his family had brought Jon to where he was today. Tormund had taken care of him, and now he wanted to take care of him when he needed him.</p><p>But his partner was as ornery and stubborn as he was loving and fierce, and he could put up one hell of a fight.</p><p>“You could take the girls hunting today,” Jon suggested.</p><p>“I’m not letting you climb up on that roof,” Tormund insisted. He smirked. “A little crow’s got a lot longer to fall before he hits the ground.”</p><p>Jon reached for Tormund’s knee affectionately, and they shared an enticing grin.</p><p>Alsi and Magritte sighed in unison from across the room.</p><p>“Da, we’ve got to go,” Alsi insisted, rising to her feet. Ana bounced up, her eyes dancing as ran to Ghost’s side, grabbing the bow and arrow that Magritte handed to her.</p><p>“Try to confine the little one to small game,” Tormund asked as he kissed Jon goodbye at the door.</p><p>“I’ll try,” Jon half-heartedly promised as Tormund snorted and headed off in the other direction. The girls trotted towards the woods in Ghost’s wake. Jon following at a steady pace behind, watching as the sunlight reflected the light from the remaining snowdrifts gathered at the base of the trees.</p><p>Jon was reminded of yet another sojourn into another beloved forest a few months back, and smiled to himself.</p><p>He hadn’t been able to being himself to visit Winterfell until summer had finally come beyond the wall. It was too dangerous, and he had a people and a family to protect. He wasn’t worried about being caught on the other side of the wall or being sent back: he and Tormund were still in steady enough communication with the Night’s Watch to know that the gate closing behind them had been final. There had been word of a final pardon from Sansa, but Jon wasn’t much concerned about the details.</p><p>He knew now what it was to belong, to truly belong, to be forgiven of his failures and disappointments, to be accepted and loved unconditionally by a group of people who weren’t constantly judging him on not living up to what his father expected of him. They didn’t care if Stark or Targaryen blood flowed in his veins. There was no place for titles or politics or the details of legitimacy in the true North. Everything in his old life that had sought to destroy him didn’t matter in his new one.</p><p>Jon didn’t want to go back to a world where he had to think about any of those things again. He didn’t want to look those fickle Northern lords in the eye again and be confronted with his failures one more time.</p><p>He didn’t want to look Sansa in the eye and know that they were right.</p><p>He went by himself the first time. They needed to establish trade with the North, and it was in their best benefit to settle this arrangement without letting old rivalries and resentments cloud the matter. He no longer resented Sansa for her part in what had happened, but he didn’t know how she would accept the new him, with his makeshift family attached.</p><p>More than anything, he wanted to protect Tormund and his daughters from feeling judged like he felt that he would be. His shattered reputation was his burden to bear, not theirs.</p><p>Tormund fought him on that decision for a long time.</p><p>Things went more smoothly than he thought they would. The lords deferred to Sansa and mostly ignored him, although the trade agreements went smoothly. Sansa had rebuilt the North smoothly and efficiently, and managed her role much more steadily than he thought that he ever could have done himself. The biggest problem was when she presented him with that pristine parcel of paper giving him a formal pardon, and expected it to be enough to want him to stay.</p><p>His heart broke almost as much as hers did when he had to tell her why it wasn’t.</p><p>Sansa didn’t condemn him for having a male lover, for adopting his family as his own, for choosing the Free Folk as his own people or daring to seize happiness for the first time in his life. He still didn’t think she truly understood, or that she ever would. He was wrong about that.</p><p>One year later, Jon visited Winterfell again, but this time he brought his family. The lords seemed more puzzled than anything else: if some of them recognized the fur-draped teenagers who flirted with the squires and stableboys as the two scrawny wildling girls who had camped outside the walls in years past, no one said anything to him. He suspected most people thought Ana was his biological child, as she had the same chestnut eyes, dark hair, and pale skin that he did. If he was looked on as the bastard who would father another child like himself on some unsuspecting wildling woman, then it wasn’t any great change from the person he had always been in his home.</p><p>The difference was that now he didn’t care anymore. And he wasn’t sure Sansa did, either.<br/>Tormund slept in his bed every night, falling into him with the same passion that he did when they were on their own. Jon tried not to think about what Alsi and Magritte doing the same with those squires and stableboys (and maids) when he wasn’t paying attention. His family hunted and bathed in the godswood, played beneath the heart tree, wandered amongst the rebuilt glass gardens.</p><p>It was everything that he had been afraid to dream of the first time.</p><p>Sansa didn’t seem half as lonely and closed off as she had the previous year: Podrick Payne had been released from his service in the Kingsguard at Sansa’s request, and was now serving as her sworn sword. Sansa denied everything no matter how crudely Tormund tried to pry the truth out of her, but Jon could tell from the sly glances that passed between the two of them that <em>service</em> was not the reason that he was in Winterfell.</p><p>As Sansa hugged him goodbye as their boat was departing, he asked her what had changed.</p><p>“Nothing’s changed,” Sansa told him curtly. “They’re your family, Jon, Your line. You’re the only one of us who has one. Who may ever have one. I’m glad to know them.”</p><p>“It’s not the way we were taught to believe,” he reminded her. “It’s not what you believed. They’re born bastards, just as much as I was.”</p><p>“You’re not – “</p><p>“I’m even more of a bastard because of who my parents were,” Jon said. “My existence caused two wars. Thousands of people are dead because of my blood.”</p><p>Saying it out loud didn’t cause him the same pain that it used to. It was a simple fact, nothing more.</p><p>“That’s not you, Jon,” Sansa said fiercely. “You are more than what anybody else tells you your blood makes you. You’re what you choose to be. And I know that your family is, too.”</p><p>Jon chuckled. “That sounds like something Arya might say.”</p><p>Sansa sighed. “Maybe someday she’ll come back here and find it out for herself. Until then, I’m your sister. And I’m the queen. And nobody else here is going to tell me whose blood doesn’t make them someone worth knowing.”</p><p>There wasn’t a trace of the haughty girl who had grown up as Catelyn’s shadow in the woman he and Tormund left behind on the docks that morning.</p><p>And as for the boy who hated himself for never being what his siblings could be? Jon wasn’t sure he knew him anymore, either.</p><p>The sunlight shot across Ana’s face as she watched her bounty go down in front of her, and Jon was was yanked out of his reverie. She squealed and bounced on her toes, almost dropping her bow as she ran ahead of Jon to catch her game. Alsi and Margritte had already disappeared into the forest ahead of them, interested in bigger and more challenging pursuits.</p><p>By the end of the day, they had brought home two does and three rabbits, Ghost had dislodged most of Ana’s braids, and Tormund had completed the longhouse repairs without falling off the roof again, much to Jon’s peace of mind.</p><p>As he sat on his lover’s lap that evening, their daughters laughing beside them, firelight dancing off their skin as Tormund’s hand threaded through his own curls, Jon once again thought of his line. The blood that flowed in his veins these days sang not for who shared it by birth, but by the family that he had chosen. That had chosen him.</p><p>His line rested in the people and the land that he loved without reservation. That loved him back the same way: passionately, fiercely, without restraint.</p><p>He now knew that it was impossible for him to belong to anyone or anything else.</p>
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